Great Scott calmly hurdling all life’s obstacles
THE blonde-mopped vision in pink and white ascends the hill, panting and wheezing. Eyes and hands and legs pointing resolutely forward as if in a rush to beat the snaking queues at the hardware shop.
The farmer rubs his eyes in faint disbelief. It is not so unusual to see somebody running on a rural road in these times of self-isolation but Molly Scott is not alone.
Trailing behind her is a car tyre attached to her waist which she pulls like a sled. It is this sight which prompts our friend’s blinking bafflement.
“Do you need any help changing the wheel on your car?” Not everyone in this part of Carlow, it seems, is aware of the international star in their midst.
“I had to explain what I was doing, it was quite amusing really,” smiles Scott, the hurdler who helped Ireland claim its first world U-20 championship relay medal in 2018.
Home is where the start is. The first faltering, toddling steps. The first play time. The first of the running and the jumping and the kicking and hitting of balls. For Scott and her neighbours, they used to gather together a variety of obstacles in the field and fancy themselves as show-jumpers. Everyone starts in the garden.
And it’s there you’ll find her still. A muster of painted barrels and abandoned poles neatly litter the garden but make for a green-tinged Olympic Arena in the heart of Hacketstown.
With all of us sequestered, every day is a school day, now; but this is also nothing new for Scott; mum, Deirdre, has been her coach for more than half her short life.
Home
As so many of us have learned, home has become our whole world.
“I’ve always trained here on my own so in a sense nothing has changed through all this crisis,” says the 21-yearold law student.
“I’m lucky to have what I have. A small enough garden. A road. A dirt track. Where I live is so rural, I’ve always been able to use my surroundings.”
And yet though shut away, she is not shut off; the roads that encircle her have been busy with exercisers of all ages.
“Kids go by and you can see them when you look back, they’re getting down to do a crouch start and trying to copy your sprint. It’s funny. If you put an image in a kid’s head, they’ll just sponge it up and copy it.”
Federation of Irish Sport CEO Mary O’Connor spoke this week of the obvious devastation that may be visited upon sport; then again, so many may have taken this time of isolation to begin sports they never contemplated.
Can see, will be. A new motto, perhaps. That’s how it all started for Scott when her neighbour brought her to Community Games training in another local field of dreams.
“It just seemed to come naturally. I remember what it was like and how I felt. I couldn’t wait to get back to that field. Playing games, running around, having races.”
And she liked winning, too. “I remember playing musical chairs in junior infants. I remember everything about that day. Waiting to react to the music. I wasn’t going to let anyone beat me. I got a prize and I remember thinking, ‘I love this feeling!’
“My mam saw me and she spotted that competitive look. Even now before a race, she’ll remind me. ‘Musical chairs!’ I remember it so vividly. I didn’t over-think it or complicate it.”
Hurdling seemed complicated; as a child she was upset because she couldn’t do it but then the Scott family’s stubborn streak kicked in. “My mam said, ‘You can do anything you want, let’s go out and figure it out.’”
Her description of the hurdling process could be adapted towards the often troublesome business of life itself.
“It’s basically just a sprint with things in the way,” she says when asked to sketch a word picture. “That’s what I was taught.
“So instead of thinking of a sprint with all these barriers, you have to pretend it’s a race on the flat. And it’s about running through the hurdles, not over them.
“Then it’s about being rhythmic yet full of aggression. You need to be fearless but also make it slow.”
And, like life too, a stumble need not end the journey.
“You could smack the fifth one and not feel the pain until you pass the finish line. The aim is to skim it as low as you can, you don’t want to spend too long in the air. You want to be co-ordinated to fill that space correctly.
“It’s just practise. Over and over again until it becomes muscle memory. It’s like a horse who doesn’t see the last four metres before a jump.
“The bad habits are hard to undo. So I’m using this time to get my arms much tighter to my body.”
Safe to say she has navigated the obstacles pretty smoothly since; as an individual and a relay team member, she is one of the bright young things in Irish athletics’ assault upon the world’s best. On the road ahead there may be more days like she enjoyed two years ago in Finland when she helped Ireland win relay silver at the U-20 worlds.
Sadly, she remains beyond the limits of her local club; in any event, Carlow is maybe the only county without an outdoor track which, occasionally, upsets her on the bad days.
So, for now, familiar home comforts suffice.